Irregular Activity

Leopard Upgrade – My Experience

I hate installing a new OS – I know…. it’s a time to clean up my laptop / desktops and make them all run super sweet again, clear out the junk, tidy up my directories, recreate backup schedules etc, etc. The fact of the matter is that I simply don’t have time for all that – my MacBook Pro has about 7Gb of free space left on it and it’s in constant use. Anyway I really wanted a couple of Leopard features and seeing as how eventually I’ll have to come up with some kind of enterprise upgrade strategy for the rest of the macs I figured I’d use lappie as the guinea pig – success for the most part.Went for the upgrade rather than Clean or Archive and Install – that’s what the sensible folks do – not me. I only went through a few basic steps for this procedure detailed below:

1. Remove all non essential files or overtly large files (Final Cut Renders), so I said bye to my DivX collection, alot of print work and some bittorrents – all moved to another HD for safe keeping.
2. Grab a copy of superduper! and then run a complete HD clone while setting the copy to be a bootable backup – that took forever (well, about 3 hours, to my firewire drive)
3. Restart the mac while holding down the option key, choose your FireWire external drive and boot from there, to make sure you have a complete bootable backup copy of your precious mac.
4. Reboot again, and use the leopard disc to perform an upgrade (Hold down C when booting or mount the disc in Tiger)
5. Wait for a while until it has finished and then boot into the goodness of Leopard – Job done.

Always backup your stuff first – you’d be amazed how many people just plough right on in and then destroy their mac and data – trust me – the extra time is worth it. Everything worked fine with the exception of a few applications.

iPod Touch not Mounting in Leopard / Syncing

So, I finally ditched Tiger and went for the newness that is Leopard – not without its problems which I will explain in another post. My problem? My shiny iPod touch won’t mount / sync or even be recognised by iTunes – it charges but that’s it (and I suspect the charging is down to USB not iTunes). What to do – fix it like this.

Fixing iPod Mounting Problems under Leopard

1. Open up your Applications directory (Command / Shift / A) and put iTunes into the Trash Can.
2. Go to Folder (Apple / Shift / G) and enter “/System/Library/Extensions” (without the quotes), find AppleMobileDevice.kext and put that in the trash as well.
3. Again – go to folder (Apple / Shift / A) and enter “/Library/Receipts” (minus quotes), find AppleMobileDeviceSupport.pkg and put that in the trash to.
4. Empty the trash (and keep fingers crossed!!)
5. Point your browser at www.apple.com/itunes and grab the latest copy, install and eureka, it’s fixed!

Even if you have loads of music on your mac, it shouldn’t make any difference as your library is stored in Music – I’ve got about 10,000 songs and everything works as normal including iPod Syncing!!!